1. Technical Field
The present description relates generally to on-line communities and, more particularly, but not exclusively, to aggregating agent generated opinions in on-line communities.
2. Related Art
The availability of powerful tools for developing and distributing Internet content has led to an increase in information, products, and services offered through the Internet, as well as a dramatic growth in the number and types of consumers using the Internet. With this increased consumer traffic, the number of community driven systems provided through the Internet, such as rating systems, collaborative information resources and databases, or other information resources, has also grown dramatically.
On-line collaborative communities and rating systems, such as Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Movies, Wikipedia, and other information resources may receive, process, and/or publish agent generated opinions and other generated information about topics and objects of interest. Systems that aggregate agent generated opinions associated with a common object may provide useful and convenient information to users.
However, the collaborative communities, rating systems, and other community driven systems must often aggregate differing, conflicting, and/or ambiguous opinions from multiple sources. In addition, those multiple sources may present opinions in different ways and in different formats. The differences, conflicts, and/or ambiguities should be aggregated to provide a more reliable consensus aggregate of opinion generation parameters.